Concurrency: The Next Important Thing

Because CPU speeds have topped off recently even though I/O speeds continue to increase, Herb Sutter posits that the Moore’s Law free performance lunch is over, i.e. no more getting faster software by waiting for the next gen of faster hardware. Instead, we’ll have to write our apps to be a lot more concurrent to take advantage of hyper-threading, multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU machines if we want our apps to continue to run faster.

What this means to me is that we’ll have to have much better language-level support for concurrent programming. What we have now sucks. Rocks. Hard.